Month: December 2008

It is finished.

I just dropped my 200 or so Christmas letters in the mailbox. The kids helped by stuffing envelopes and slapping on labels and stamps. What a production. Every year I have a rush of creativity about some new thing I can try. And every year I run into crazy problems I wouldn’t have expected. We ran out of toner in the printer. The labels all printed a quarter-inch too high. We ran out of stamps (well, technically we were short by a single stamp– so someone ended up with a Liberty Bell stamp). Et cetera.

Back in The Day I would buy a dozen boxes of Christmas cards and hand write all of my little missives to friends and family, but that just doesn’t work any more. When I retire, maybe I’ll go back to that…

“Don’t think you can. Know you can.”

— Morpheus, in The Matrix

Awesome ThinkGeek t-shirt:

“Do or do not. There is no try.”

“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Wow, it’s cold out there today. In fact, it’s booger-freezing cold, which I is a technical term I use to refer to the fact that when you step outside your boogers immediately freeze up.

Alex and I walked over to Blockbuster to return our movie, and it was maybe a quarter-mile but by the time we got back home my cheeks were burning and my fingers were chilled (even through my thick ski gloves).

It looks like the rest of the week is going to be more of the same. Winter is definitely here.

I just bought a new hard drive online. One terabyte. One hundred bucks.

Holy cow. I still remember my first hard drive, a forty megabyte monster that sat on my desk and was bigger (and much louder) than the laptop I’m using to write this. It cost something like four hundred dollars used. Now, for a quarter of the price, I get twenty-five thousand times more storage.

Isn’t technological progress marvelous?

Tonight I was out walking to the grocery store and noticed the moon was pretty darn bright. It turns out that tonight it’s at perigee (its closest orbital point to Earth) and in fact is closer than it’s been in the past fifteen years.

Evidently that makes it about 14% larger than any other full moon this year, and correspondingly it’s 30% brighter. Wow.

I saw this as I poked around some blogs this evening. Absolutely classic.

I often crack myself up as I’m working on projects for clients. For example, I built an online survey system for a local company, and to demonstrate it I entered a few sample questions so they could see how it works:

If these guys aren’t Monty Python fans this won’t mean much to them, of course, but at least I get a good chuckle out of it.

And lo, the Lord did look down upon Longmont and bequeath beautiful 60-degree weather so those therein need not hangeth their Christmas lights in freezing cold.